Macs in the Enterprise: ERP
Cloud computing has made platforms meaningless, which opens doors for Macs to tap into business software.
CIO — Brian Keare stares at a complex dashboard on his Mac all day long, watching sales and inventory flow in and out of his small company in southern California. "Who would have thought that a finance guy like me would be on a Mac?" says Keare, CFO of Circle of Friends, which sells baby bath products.
Keare uses business software from SaaS provider NetSuite. The Mac, he says, is great for pulling financial data from the cloud. NetSuite's user interface has a ton of JavaScript, and so Keare uses Safari 4 beta on a Mac, which renders JavaScript lightening quick. "It loads in under 10 seconds compared to 30 or 45 seconds on any other browser," Keare says, adding that Safari 4 beta didn't work so well running on a PC.
[ CIOs debate the high cost of Macs for employees. | Find out the top enterprise Mac support websites. ]
Business software has traditionally been Apple's forbidden fruit. Few, if any, of the popular ERP packages ran on Macs or required emulators to do so. But cloud computing and open source software have made platforms somewhat meaningless—and now ERP is within Apple's reach. "Things are becoming more platform agnostic," says Alex Morken, IT manager of Chris King Precision Components. The manufacturer of bicycle components uses Macs to tap into open source ERP software from xTuple.
Apple hasn't missed the signs, either. Apple recently updated its series of 30-minute, online seminars for accounting and ERP. Apple's ERP seminars cover five products: QuickBooks for small businesses; AccountEdge for up to 50 employees; MoneyWorks for businesses with more than 20 concurrent users; AcctVantage for businesses with more than 50 concurrent users; and PowerEasy for companies that need to integrate financial reporting and tracking with inventory, sale, purchasing and time, and billing.
Of course, Apple has a long way to go in ERP. Large companies run on industrial strength packages from Oracle and SAP. Midmarket companies gravitate toward ERP software like Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains). Smaller companies ride largely on SaaS and open source ERP providers like NetSuite and xTuple, which have seen an uptick in Macs accessing their software.
"We see more Macs on a percentage basis each year," says Ned Lilly, CEO of xTuple. "I would estimate that currently, across all users in all customers, the mix is about 70 percent Windows, 25 percent Mac and 5 percent Linux. But the number of customers that have some Macs running xTuple is probably closer to 35 percent."
